Immaculate Conception, 8 December, 2023: Genesis 3:9=15, 20; Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12; Luke 1: 26-38
Our First Reading could remind us that when Adam and Eve chose to sin, their wills had not been weakened by original sin. Mary, even as the Immaculate Conception, could have sinned but chose not to sin. Her extraordinary status is not in competition with our vulnerability but she is the unpretentious trailblazer of living our redeemed potential.
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is essentially Christological: her extraordinary beginnings prepare Mary for the Incarnation while being actualized through the redemptive work of her Incarnate Son. This is not some sort of retro-active benefit but unfolds in the timeless “now” of God’s life, revealing our humanity’s capacity for God. That eternal “now” touches another Christological point: the Son of Mary is not limited to a short lifetime in Galilee but is the eternal Word of God, and the living link between the uncreated Godhead and created humanity, made in the image and likeness of God.
Mary is never exempt from human experience. She has to ponder her life to progressively arrive at understanding. She suffers displacement and exile, worry, loss, doubt and sorrow; on occasion, she burns the supper; she witnesses her Son’s execution and buries him.
But in all this she reveals that the vagaries of life are not necessarily punishment for sin, but may be joined to the redemptive work of her Son, a correspondence between divine and human life. All those ups and downs are the longing of contingent being for divinity, the pains of finitude stretching to break its boundaries and welcome the infinite.
When we celebrate the Immaculate Conception, don’t we celebrate the finest offering to God of our human race and the marvelous work God would do in all of us, as already in Mary?